On my last trip to China I spent some time in Guangdong province. This is the first province that you enter when coming from Hong Kong or the last one you see when traveling overland to HK. The countryside is quite tropical and beautiful when passing papaya groves and farmers working rice fields, I felt that it's probably similar to Thailand and Vietnam. The downside to Guangdong is the massive amount of manufacturing that goes on. Seriously - factories cover the landscape and it becomes especially intensified when you reach Shenzhen - also known as "the world's factory." 20 years ago Shenzhen was a fishing village and now it's home to the richest people in mainland China. It also probably wins the award for the widest income gap in the country. Although this area is the heart of the Cantonese Chinese language (or dialect), you can get by with Mandarin no problem because just about every worker, laborer and service employee is a migrant from another Chinese province. It's a fascinating and sad area just based upon the migrant issue alone. Hundreds of thousands of people from all across China working and trying to find work in the center of the globalized economy.
Leaving Guangdong and especially Shenzhen feels like leaving a coal mine after working a double shift. The city is so polluted that after a couple of hours I had a dry, rough throat. When I got on the TurboJet which is a high speed ferry which travels between the Shenzhen port and Kowloon/Hong Kong, my eyes hurt and I was coughing/sneezing. I knew I didn't have a cold, it was just my body revolting from the thick polluted air. Check out these photos of the air in Shenzhen taken from my hotel. Nice, eh?
Welcome to beautiful Shenzhen
View from the TurboJet en route to Hong Kong.
ah...detox time on the turbojet after leaving the coal mine.
posted by cp
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